Generic church of crystal and/or light

>generic church of crystal and/or light
>generic church of evil and/or darkness
Why are religions so often clearly good or bad in RPGs, Veeky Forums? Real world churches are a riotous mess with a thousand arguments had over them.

Usually in games I just see a kind of shit version of Catholicism, some badwrong church that it's hard to believe anyone worships at, and some players rolling actual atheist characters.

Religions are usually done in a very simple way so that GM's have a lot more leeway in personalizing them and giving them flavor.

If you take the given information and exclusively use on that, without adding your own personal touches, you are a bad GM.

Coming up with original religions is pretty hard. It's a complex topic that combines philosophy, mythology, theology, culture and history if you really want to do it justice.

I just do several churches that worship several gods
there are no church of evil,since who would worship a god who is bad?
seems counterproductive

>there are no church of evil,since who would worship a god who is bad?
There are a lot of polytheistic religions that actually existed with gods who were bad.

but they were not the typical fantasy "give me sacrifice so I will give you power and kill your bullies",it was more of a "sacrifice your firstborn or world will end"
Like Mayans

>Why are religions so often clearly good or bad in RPGs, Veeky Forums? Real world churches are a riotous mess with a thousand arguments had over them.

RPGs aren't real and not many of them try to be. a lot of fantasy RPGs are rooted in some kind of cosmic struggle between good and evil which is represented in the major religions, and the characters, factions, etc. simple, yes, but a lot of people like it. grimdark settings tend to have grimdark religions. grey, gritty settings borrow more from real life.

basically it doesn't have much to do with religion itself, more the tone of the setting.

Because RPGs are games and not real.

>it was more of a "sacrifice your firstborn or world will end"
>Like Mayans

Mesoamerica is a weird kettle of fish, given how they viewed their gods in an entirely different manner than Europeans do.

Aztec/Maya (which can be combined here for simplicities sake without too much glossing over) viewed their gods as being entities completely above their comprehension and plane of existence. However, these gods created and dominated the world in their constant struggles with one another, and vied for cosmic power. These gods would often interfere in the world (which was created by the flesh of two gods who sacrificed themselves, hence why human sacrifice was so important to their religions) and drew power from human acts done in their name.

Each god had a positive and negative aspect, and through sacrifice humans could balance out these aspects to make life manageable. Worshipping the God of War, for example, brought valor and glory to their people - but if not checked could lead to their society crumbling in total violent anarchy. Praising the God of Rains brought food and fertility - but not getting it correct would bring drought. Sometimes, no matter what you did, these gods would unleash their bad sides on the world for their own inscrutable reasons, and you just had to offer what you could to them and hope they liked it.

They also believed that human beings could act as "avatars" and "mouthpieces" of the gods, though they did not believe that their gods could literally take a human form (which caused some confusion when Montezuma called Cortez a god, but also said he was just as human as he was).

TL;DR shit's weird and fascinating.

Just look at like, Sekhmet

A goddess of killing and partying hard, what's not to like?

First off, most RPGs, their makers, and their players exist in a Western world. Their concept of morality is based heavily in modern Jewdeochristian morals. Especially in systems with absolute good and evil.

Next, they usually take place in worlds where the gods are not apocryphal, rewritten, reinterpreted rule-sets made deities. They are real thugs that command directly, smite he nonbelievers publicly, and endow their believers with powers. The "good" god will TELL his followers to do good things. The "evil" god will tell his worshipers to do evil things.

Because Gods tend to be real in fantasy settings. A church is universal because the Gods can strictly define what they want their church to be like.

Like, if one branch of the church is deviating too much, God can always send a message to his priests that go: "Hey, get back in line or fuck off."

There might be the typical reasons of personal gain or mental illness.

For example an evil god of shadows, darkness, murder, plots and revenge gets worshiped by Machiavellian schemers in the hope he'll grant a boon to them and hope that he doesn't call in the debt owed. These worshipers can range in alignment from ruthless but well-meaning individuals to purely self-serving nobles to hired assassins who kill for money.

A god of murder, bloodshed, rage and slaughter could be worshiped by people who are mentally ill, prone to anger, have PTSD or an obsessive hatred of some group.

If a god can take direct action like that, there is no need for PCs.

Why do we have the evil people in RPGs be armor clad badasses, all powerful wizards, or horrible monsters from the depths of hell when most of the villains of the real world are suit wearing lawyers and wall street types?

Because it's more fun than real life. That's why we play it.

philosophies are creative in planescape
>

>Why are religions so often clearly good or bad in RPGs, Veeky Forums?
For the sake reason often orders, factions and even single individuals are (depending on the setting) - to provide morally unambiguous background players can quickly, easily and without worries form attitude toward and relations with, not requiring any real deliberation, providing guilt-less opponent or unquestionable ally.

Games can be complex but as entertainment sometimes (not always) certain simplicity is welcome so one can concentrate on the adventure. That's why it's how it is in RPGs, with religions, political systems, characters and abilities that can be summed up in a few words.

A good deal of people involved in RPGs and the like have some rather... interesting... views regarding religion...

For the same reason that history rarely flows in a realistic manner in RPG settings; most game designers don't have a strong grasp of how these concepts work in real life and/or don't have the time/energy to actually create them realistically.

...

Switch light worship to solar worship and you've got the basis of basically half the proto-religions out there.

Give him a life goddess wife and make him lord of the sky and bam, you've got a pantheon.

Lord of Light is the start of the logic train, it should not be the culmination.

Game creators don't care about anything else than the main theme of their setting. And if they are not expers in given field, they don't care even further.
This applies to pretty much anything, not just religion.

>summerposting.jpg

If you're going to meme, at least know how you silly dingus

Because this makes antagonists easier for GMs, as well as making it easier for paladins to be somewhat face-y for the party.

Also, not everything needs to be grey, black and white morality is something that has been around since the dawn of storytelling and is going to be around until the end of humanity.

It's definitely not something restricted to D&D.

Because most writers and players don't understand religion. How it functions, how they form, what forms they take, how they change. It's probably for the best they don't try to take a shot at fully fleshing one out.

Even the typical polytheistic pantheon makes me cringe because of how obviously little they know about pantheons. Pantheons are some of the coolest things out there, syncretism taken to the nth degree, customs and mythologies being centralized and unified between formerly distinct cultures, cults competing for power, entirely new entities coming out of the woodwork and foreign ones being accepted into the fold. It's a really neat phenomenon that takes many forms (hindu deities are a mix of Aryan and Indo-dravidian deities and the religion probably formed as a fusion of two or more existing loose pantheons.

If you want an example of a setting that handles religion pretty well but isn't so complex that you need to really understand religion to wrap your mind around it, just read Dune.

well, different gods represent different things to different people at different times. Set was only the "god of evil" because his cult lost.

But also, you're thinking of gods wrong. for one, just because a pseudo-deity exists in your "pantheon" doesn't mean it's necessarily something you worship or pray to. two, "prayer" or worship isn't necessarily what we think of in the west. in Roman and to a certain extent Greek paganism, systems of offerings were almost contractual in nature (if I sacrifice this horse to you I'll get safe passage on the sea, I'll build a temple in each corner of the empire if you lend my army strength, etc.), I believe at a certain point in Roman history they would even physically write out contracts with the gods.

That's not even mentioning how political religion was in Rome. Why do you think the cult of Isis was allowed and popular even within the walls of the Urbs, but Christianity was outlawed? Cont.

They wouldn't acknowledge the deity of the emperor, which flew in the face of the "Roman system". Essentially, when Rome would move into a place, they erected Roman-style towns, built Roman temples, and equated various local gods with Roman equivalents (the baths in Bath, England were dedicated to "Sulis-Minerva", Sullis being a native Celtic deity and Minerva being the best equivalent, and the baths themselves are called the "Aquae Sullis"). But Christianity with it's whole "one god no others" obviously flies in the face of this. Jews were never as big a target of persecution because they're much more insular (China also fought the spread of Christianity but left the Jews in peace, there's a sizable Jewish community in China to this day that goes totally unmolested).

This may seem like a ramble, but it's all to illustrate the point that religion, even older pagan religious traditions, are more complicated than "y does he exist if he evul".

>Also, not everything needs to be grey, black and white morality is something that has been around since the dawn of storytelling and is going to be around until the end of humanity.
Black and white is fine for *storytelling*, but honestly it doesn't really fly for worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is like meta-storytelling, creating a setting in which many stories could be told. Black and white storytelling is fine irl because there's a rich canvas of variations on grey to draw from and portray however you like. But if the world you're working with is inherently black and white already, you have much less to work with.

>Like Mayans
There's so much more to it than that. Consider pain rituals. They would literally get a priest to inflict intense pain in them, and their delirious hallucinations were considered to be visions from the gods. So literally if you're facing a big decision or a lot of uncertainty in your life, you'd go to the local creepy witchdoctor's house and he'd stab you in the tongue with a wood stake.

And the "sacrifice to make the sun rise tomorrow" was more of an Aztec thing. Though the Aztec are a weird case because they were illiterate nomads who were living up with the Navajo until they wandered South, conquered a lot of the locals, and adopted many of their customs. Basically they're the American Yuan, but with mesoamerican paganism thrown into the mix.

What really grinds my gears is

>the setting's religion is an Olympian-esque pantheon, clerics and temples are always strictly dedicated to one deity
>said pantheon is universal, there are no religions that refuse to recognize it altogether
>people worship objectively evil gods (yeah I know, there are some RL examples like the Aztec gods, but there was a good reason to worship them as they prevented the apocalypse. Nobody has ever worshipped an Objective God of Evil, Death and Darkness who eats babies. Even theistic Satanists believe Satan to be a good being)

The single best way to create a compelling pantheon (and in the process, setting) is confirm the existence of divine magic and miracles, but the nature of god is never established. A sufficiently devout cleric can cast spells regardless of who they worship, as long as they legitimately believe in that deity.

I've done this in my Original The Setting, and it's given me religions that range from animism to Sun-based Catholicism to even Dragon worship.

You don't necessarily worship a Bad or Evil god (unless you're a demented cultist/decadent libertine); you make offerings and abase yourself to them in the hopes that they won't let their evil in the world (diseases, bad luck, infertility, bad crops, being eaten by bears, etc) rape you.unmercifully until you long for the sweet release of death.

>Why are religions so often clearly good or bad in RPGs
I feel like alignment plays a pretty big part.

Lawful Good religions would naturally be good, Chaotic Evil religions would naturally be bad, Neutral religions would have some leeway but in general wouldn't be seen as "bad".

That said, it would be interesting to have different religions for the same god with for different views of said god. Maybe a Neutral Good for worshipers who emphasize their god's mercy, Lawful Evil who emphasize their god's wrath, or Chaotic Neutral to emphasize their god's tendency to do whatever the fuck he feel like.

You know the cultists usually expect to get something from their worship. Power, better afterlife, etc

That's basically what we do in reality, except we change the names too while we're at it.

Yep. Sometimes we don't even change the names either.

Take the Abrahamic religions and the many different Christian denominations for an obvious example.

I always run multiple variant churches for the same god in my games.

Aztec gods are neutral as fuck.
You see in Aztec mths there were several worlds before this one, they all failed for one reason or another and were killed off.
Every time a new world comes to be another god would be the sun, they could only do this once.
Now the last god is on it, sadly he lost a limb in a fight so he is weakened. But he does his damn best to keep this world going, which the Aztecs very much appreciated.
But in his weakened state he needs power to keep things going, that's the reasons for the sacrifices - to provide the sun with the power to rise again and keep our sorry asses alive.
In their believe system the sacrifice would pay the god back what said god lent him.

Others were as ofter bros that saved people as they were total dicks that killed a ton.
Not really evil, just very very foreign.

There was an user once who wrote quite a bit about it, sadly I do not have it saved.

Because games are supposed to be fun, and for most people, things that are fun:
1. Aren't difficult to understand
and
2. Don't confront them with real shit when they're just trying to pretend they're elves and wizards

Sounds a lot like Lovecraft desu